Even Pan Chimes In at Early Music Festival

A Boston Biennial Celebrates the Baroque Tradition

BOSTON — What most struck a visitor to the biennial Boston Early Music Festival last week, after many years away, was the strength of the home team. It used to be that most star attractions came from abroad, and many still do, this year including Hespèrion XXI, led by that brightest of stars, Jordi Savall.

But the resident Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra has now risen to star status itself, with Robert Mealy as concertmaster. Mr. Mealy seems to foster excellence wherever he goes, whether he’s at Trinity Wall Street in New York, as concertmaster of the Trinity Baroque Orchestra; at Yale, as director of the Yale Baroque Ensemble; or at the Juilliard School, as director of the historical performance program.

From its inception in 1980, the festival has relied heavily on musicians from the Boston-New York axis. And the number of players and the level of performance have risen greatly in recent years, largely because of the Yale and Juilliard programs. The festival’s theme, “Youth: Genius and Folly,” seemed wholly appropriate here.

Not the least quality Mr. Mealy conveys is energy. The festival orchestra, which played through four performances of Handel’s four-hour opera “Almira,” an evening of two chamber operas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and a full-length orchestral concert, seemed tireless. You hated to think of the time it had spent in rehearsal.

The orchestral concert, on Thursday evening at Jordan Hall of the New England Conservatory, was called “The Birth of the Orchestra: The Extravagant and Sonorous Music of Paris and Rome, ca. 1700.” It showed the coming together of the modern orchestra that would eventually form the basis of the symphony, and included a centerpiece of dance numbers by Lully performed charmingly, in costume, by the Boston Early Music Festival Dance Ensemble.

More numerous than the budding sonata forms you might look for in nascent symphonic works were backward-looking pieces built on ground basses: chaconnes and a passacaglia. A working title for the program, Mr. Mealy reported, had been “Chaconne Till You Moan.” (Audience members groaned.) Pieces by Handel, Corelli, Georg Muffat, John Blow and Philippe Heinrich Erlebach were varied and mostly enchanting, and the sounds were indeed extravagant and luxurious.

On Saturday evening a contingent of the orchestra, the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble, returned to opera — a coupling of Charpentier’s “Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers” (“Descent of Orpheus Into the Underworld”) and “Couronne de Fleurs” (“Wreath of Flowers”) — in a production largely executed by the “Almira” team, with Gilbert Blin as director, Anna Watkins as costume designer and Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs as musical directors. The 10 players were huddled onstage at Jordan Hall, encircled by flowers as the action took place around them.

Photo

From left, Caitlin Klinger, Lydia Brotherton, Megan Stapleton and Thea Lobo in the Boston Early Music Festival’s operas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.Credit
Kathy Wittman

In “La Couronne,” a pastoral ditty based on Molière, poets vie to heap the greatest praise on Louis XIV. Pan eventually interrupts the contest with the words “To sing of Louis’s intrepid courage,/There is no voice knowledgeable enough,/No words grand enough to sketch the picture of it.”

“La Descente” also ends abruptly, after two acts (of an intended three?), showing Orpheus and Eurydice leaving Hades. It stops short of Orpheus’s grand misstep, a forbidden glance back at Eurydice, which provides turmoil enough for a third act.

Mr. Blin conceived the captivating notion of incorporating “La Descente” into “La Couronne” as part of the contest. Further, he wove in a bit of historical speculation: that the irascible Lully, composer to Louis, may have asserted his royal privilege to squelch a third act of “La Descente” in 1686. So — amusingly — Lully appeared as a character to call a halt to the proceedings. He limped badly, suggesting that he had already stabbed himself in the foot with the staff he used to conduct, a wound that led to gangrene and — three months later, in March 1687 — his death.

The timing of this conceit would be dicey. But it all made for an evening of glorious music, tenuously and piquantly tied to history.

In contrast, you could have wished for a slight nod to the present during the Hespèrion concert at Jordan Hall on Saturday afternoon. Called “Istanbul,” the program celebrated “the city that stands at the crossroads of the continents of Europe and Asia,” as Mr. Savall wrote in booklet notes.

Increasingly, Mr. Savall’s music-making has stood at that crossroads, and Hespèrion, for this occasion, consisted of excellent musicians from Turkey, Armenia, Morocco, Greece and Spain. They played a lively polyglot program that drew on Dimitrie Cantemir’s “Book of the Science of Music” and on Ottoman, Sephardic, Greek and Armenian traditions. But it felt a bit unsettling to be reveling in these tunes, lively or lamenting, without some acknowledgment that things are rough in Istanbul at the moment.

Mr. Savall is the most dignified, thoughtful and humane of musicians, as evidenced in his recent release, “Pro Pacem” (“For Peace”) on his Alia Vox label: a CD packaged in a lavish book of philosophical essays rendered in eight languages. A few words might have helped.

Other concerts that deserve more than the mere mention that space allows here included a splendid account of Bach’s “Clavierübung,” Part III (21 chorale preludes wrapped in the great “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue), on Thursday on the wonderful organ of the First Lutheran Church, by John Scott, the director of music at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue; a beautiful multimedia presentation of “Cantigas de Santa Maria,” attributed to Alfonso X, by the Newberry Consort at Jordan Hall, also on Thursday; a concert of 17th-century Austrian music in the experimental Stylus Phantasticus by the ensemble Gli Incogniti, named for “the unknowns” in its repertory, in Jordan Hall; and a late-night program of music from Hamburg in the young Handel’s time there, including drinking songs, at Jordan Hall on Saturday by Mr. Stubbs’s Tragicomedia and friends. This last, with time allowed for a beer beforehand, came as a needed release after an exhaustingly intense few days.

Correction: June 21, 2013

A picture caption on Wednesday with a critic’s notebook article about the Boston Early Music Festival, using information from the festival, misstated the given name of a performer shown in a scene from an opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. She is Thea Lobo, not Theo.